After HBO Max, which had caused controversy by abandoning the film BatgirlNetflix has given up on two films: The Inheritance and House/Wife. An increasingly common practice in Hollywood, but not always for the same reasons.
In good financial health since the launch of its more affordable formula thanks to advertisements, Netflix seems to want to save money to continue making money. On the site of The Hollywood Reporterwe learned on January 27, 2023 that two films ordered and produced by Netflix, The Inheritance (Alejandro Brugues) and House/Wife (Danis Goulet), were finally disconnected by the streaming service, without it being known exactly what motivated this decision. The opportunity to take stock of these increasingly common practices in Hollywood, such as “tax write-offs” (tax deductionss).
After a wave at HBO Max, it’s Netflix’s turn
The Hollywood Reporter understands that The Inheritance and House/Wife could be resold to other broadcasters, which differs from the strategy of HBO Max, which has no qualms about completely removing a work to obtain tax compensation. We can however assume that Netflix has the same motivations as its competitor, namely to save money by removing these two contents from its future schedule. His goal is probably to pay less taxes, in order to increase his profits. (And nothing says that these two films will be sold, because we do not know the conditions of Netflix).
In a difficult economic context, the audiovisual giants are increasingly resorting to what are called “tax write-offs”, which could simply be translated as tax deductions.
To put it simply, abandoning an expensive film on the pretext that it is a failure a priori, a business can get a tax break to compensate for self-inflicted financial losses. This allows him to declare less, and therefore pay less. This practice was highlighted in August 2022 by the film Batgirl, dropped to everyone’s surprise as it was ready to air. HBO Max did not judge its quality to match its cost and therefore removed it, with no possibility for its authors to save it. The group has since confirmed that scrapping finished projects is part of its strategy to increase revenue. HBO has become the specialist in dropping movies and has already saved billions of dollarswhile allowing itself to resell certain abandoned content to third-party services to increase its profits.
Since then, the practice has been regularly denounced by specialists in the sector, who see it as a means of silencing artists. AMC, Paramount, Disney, Universal… All are regularly singled out for the millions of dollars in savings they achieve by killing finished projects, sometimes without giving them the possibility of returning elsewhere. Enough to leave production teams who have spent several months on a project on the floor, as if their work was worth nothing.
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